Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

HSDPA as Broadband: Report 1
12 November 2007 in Phones & Reviews | Comments (0)

I dumped my ADSL subscription about a month ago and switched to using solely HSDPA, or as it’s called in marketing speak: mobile broadband. Serving as my modem is a S60 powered Nokia 6120 Classic (which is not be confused with the older model) which I bought for around 250 € at an online store. I will try to document my experiences and experiments with HSDPA surfing in this series which I’ll call “HSDPA as Broadband” in a semi-weekly fashion.

Why bye bye ADSL?

There’s a lot of advertising in Finland currently for what the operators (or “carriers” in North America) are calling “mobile broadband”. The prices are quite low in comparison to ADSL lines:

(* = the upstream speed is not mentioned on the linked page, nor have I been able to locate any information on normal uplink speeds in UMTS)

As you can see from the table above, mobile broadband from the operator Saunalahti is priced very attractively even when compared to their ASDL offering. However, I should note that the last in the list (the limited time offer) is a binding offer that binds you to the operator for a year forward. So, you only have to pay 10€ for the same speed as others have to pay 30€ for. This is the offer I took the “risk” in getting, risk meaning that I’m practically chained to the operator for a year onwards. Back in March, when the offer was available, I only had the Nokia N91 which didn’t support HSDPA but I had a similar data plan which cost the same but was limited to 128 bits per second. With the max speed for all UMTS phones being 384 kbps, it was at least more speed gained for the same price.

Then, late this summer, the 6120 Classic was released at a very competitive price and I (sort of) had to buy it. The price was around 250€ and that included a 2 megapixel camera, larger resolution screen (compared to the N91), faster processor, HSDPA, USB mini connector and a too small phone to fit my taste — really, it’s a ridiculously small phone! It’s so small and lightweight that you can really forget that it is in the pocket of the pants you’re wearing, until the vibrating signal on that thing starts vibrating like something you’d have to measure on a Richter scale.

Well, let me just leave the details of the phone for a possible later review.

At the end of September, I started a slow transition from one alphabet soup to another; saying bye and thanks for the fish to my ADSL operator and hello HSDPA! It wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be: getting the dial-up to work over Bluetooth wasn’t possible to do in Vista for some strange reason. Using Nokia Suite’s “Connect to the Internet” function over Bluetooth didn’t work a single time and neither did dialing manually via Vista’s own “Connect to a network“. Vista’s own dialer claimed the device was sort of malfunctioning, and Nokia’s own dialer claimed the phone wasn’t connected… which it was. Strangly, getting my older N91 working as a Bluetooth modem in Vista worked after I installed the driver for it (which came via Windows Update, I think) but downloading the 6120’s Vista Bluetooth modem driver from Nokia just didn’t seem to want to work with Vista. Vista claimed again and again that the device wouldn’t start properly.

(I should note here that my old Windows Mobile device Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 720 did manage to connect and surf on the Internets through Bluetooth, but newer Vista won’t do the same. I wonder why that is… )

So, I gave up on using Bluetooth for now. Bluetooth was a potential bottleneck for the speed anyway as I only have Bluetooth 1.2 on my Acer Ferrari notebook and not the faster Bluetooth 2.0 EDR. Besides, the 6120 does have a mini USB connector which is simple enough to use and shouldn’t be too much of a bottleneck. Even weirder was the fact that the Nokia dialer didn’t really always work with the 6120 over USB either. It was playing some sort of roulette with the dialing sequence and only sometimes connecting successfully. This led me to use the Vista dialer and I found the Vista dialer more stable and somewhat faster than Nokia’s own implementation.

Using the Vista dialer mostly worked fine, until Windows Update provided a “Nokia USB Modem Driver” update, which silly me installed although I should have known better. I don’t know what the issue with the driver was, but being from the the 5th of October 2007, it was just worthless. I’m waiting for Nokia to release a better driver — not Microsoft since the last fiasco with the driver updates via Windows Update.

Now THERE’S Your Problem!

With the problems of getting connected over and done, it was time to try the surfing experience. I felt amazed at the speed of HSDPA compared to just plain UMTS (3G)! It was speedy and fast and the latest alphas and betas of Opera 9.5 just barely keeping up. However, there were some initial strange problems. Every now and then, it seemed like the connection seized to function and this seemed happened the most when I was using Opera. Coincidentally, I noticed that the connection seized when Outlook and Opera were both open and both were downloading emails and websites. Dumbfounded by this remarkable problem, I thought it would be best to check the numbers of connections that I had set Opera to use.

My max connections to server and max total connections settings in Opera were set to 64 and 128 respectively. This was the optimal setting for my previous ADSL connection in the past, but no longer so. I decided to turn the connection settings down to the defaults (8 and 20, again respectively) and tried again. Amazingly, this time around, the connection worked much better and was more stable although both Opera and Outlook were open and running simultaneously. Now, there was my problem!

What’s The Catch?

Vaasa is a city quite full of students and it is possible that some have chosen to use mobile broadband as their Internet connection or maybe the HSDPA cell is just a bit too crowded. I believe it is overloaded because someday my HSDPA connection works just fine the whole evening (which is when I’m using it more actively) and someday it works for a minute or two with a lock-up following. However, since the phone is a bit unstable, it should be noted that the lock-ups can be caused by some bug in the phone itself and not necessarily by the network.

Furthermore, the speed varies greatly: one day it is up at 1 Mbit/s and another day it is barely above 100 kbit/s (based on the tests I’ve done using Speedtest.net). Here are some of the speed tests I’ve done in chronological order starting with the latest test (dates are in the format mm/dd/yyyy):

You should also note that the distance isn’t exactly true as the Speedtest.net server believes that I’m in Helsinki (that’s true for the operator, at least) but I’m really in Vaasa which makes the distance to Tallin and Turku much much larger. Also, network traffic might skew the results of the speed test, so take the results lightly.

The operator has stated that they will prioritize traffic from business users which leaves a very likely explanation for the speed variations that I’ve discovered. Another factor in the speed might be the distance and load to the cell that I’m connected to. As far as I’ve been able to discover, the cell is located about 5 km south of my apartment. So, moving further away from the windows in my apartment makes the connection switch from HSDPA into EDGE which is noticeably slower. If someone from Elisa or Saunalahti is reading this, then let me send you this wish for next year: bring more HSDPA 3G cells to northern Vaasa, please? Maybe one of those brand new 900 MHz 3G cells could be installed?

Conclusion

For the first month using HSDPA fully, I’ve been surprised by the speed but also the lack of speed at times. There are some issues with the phone that I’m using as my modem:

• Vista Bluetooth won’t work with it
• some lock-ups when using too many concurrent TCP/IP connections in Opera and other applications
• it switches to EDGE when not close enough to the windows of my apartment

But, overall, HSDPA could be called mobile broadband as soon as the speed is more consistent and cells less crowded by current HSDPA users.